CONCLUSIONS - Inventing the PC - page 175

and the company remained firmly committed to the language
throughout its decade-long history. Gaining acceptance for its
APL portable platform from the APL community was crucial to
MCM , but such support wasn't easy to get. To explain why, one
has to recall that throughout most of the 1970s, the computer
industry viewed centralized large computer systems as the only
means by which large organizations could meet their data pro-
cessing needs. The APL community, resident mostly on main-
frames, supported this view, and the mainframe was the focus
of most APL software development activities. Although APL
had never became a dominant language for mainframes, robust
and mature APL products were developed during that time and
successfully used in a broad range of applications.
However, MCM was developing neither large hardware sys-
tems nor groundbreaking APL software for mainframes. The
announcements of MCM computers never generated any sub-
stantial discussion on the potential of microcomputers for APL
expansion into new application areas, as advocated by MCM ,
and MCM 's APL interpreter - the first such interpreter ever de-
veloped for a microcomputer - didn't capture the attention of
APL ers either. Perhaps a few departures from the APL standards
evident in the MCM / APL language - taken by MCM to combat
the MCM /70's severe shortage of memory - were unacceptable
to those APL purists who were preoccupied with advancing the
language and its applications on mainframe computers. Perhaps
the slow speed of the MCM /70 and the short word-length of its
CPU (just 8-bit) were turning people away from APL “micro-
portability”; that is, from the development of APL dialects for
microcomputers. Whatever the case may be, the APL commun-
ity had never paid significant attention to MCM products, or
to microcomputing in general, until the late 1970s when it had
became evident that small, dedicated microprocessor-based
systems could deliver enough computing power to successfully
run many applications at much lower per user costs than either